Eviction day for Venezuela’s slum in the sky

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The Tower of David, a building that was abandoned in the 1990s and became the world’s tallest slumFernando Llano/AP

James HiderLatin America Correspondent

Last updated at 6:22AM, July 23 2014

It was a city within a city, a vertical slum right in the middle of central
Caracas that was home to 3,000 people who had no other home.

Depending of who you asked, the Tower of David was either a monument to
Venezuela’s socialist revolution or a crime-filled squat so notorious that
it even featured in the US hit series Homeland.

Now the giant squat is being cleared and its thousands of ragged residents
moved to government-built housing south of the city. Soldiers with AK-47s
and police in riot gear started evicting residents this week, slowly
dismantling one of the